The Income from Paid Knowledge and Provision of Free knowledge: in Success, One Tries to Let Others be Benefited

• 1、Economics and Trade School , Hunan University, ChangSha 410079

Abstract：With the development of social network and sharing economy, the socialized question and answer community has generated two kinds of different knowledge output: free knowledge and paid knowledge. However, is there certain internal connection between \'utilitarian\' knowledge payment and \'commonweal\' knowledge sharing? This is still an important theoretical problem to be solved. This paper analyzes the incentive effect provided by the income from paid knowledge for the free knowledge from the unique perspective of self-verification theory, and considers the regulating effect of individual differences such as \'self-presentation\' and \'reputation assets\'. Furthermore, the above mechanism is empirically tested through adopting the web crawlers to capture data of \'Zhihu\' community. The empirical research indicates that the income has a positive impact on the supply of free knowledge, but its incentive effect has significant \'individual difference\'. The income has a greater incentive effect for the individuals who disclose their real occupational identity compared with the anonyms; the income has a greater incentive effect to the individuals who do not own the reputation assets compared with those who have such assets. There is an interesting inspiration in this paper: the knowledge providers have the emotion of \'in success, one tries to let others be benefited\' under the Internet environment, that is, there may be certain relation of unity of opposites between \'the income from paid knowledge\' and \'free sharing\'.

Keywords： Knowledge Community Knowledge Payment Free Knowledge Incentive Mechanism Individual Difference